THE NEW YORKER being several weeks or months later." The moral of "Nature's Metropo- lis" -and this is truly a history with a moral-has to do with the abstrac- tion of natura] products from natural places, or, at least, from places that once were natural. It is an ancient, romantic habit to call the country " I " h . " . fi ' I " Th natura, t e CIty artl cIa. at distinction has been reinforced in the United States by the idea of the fron- tier, and especially by Frederick J ack- son Turner's formulation of it. In his model of westward expansion, the city comes late, after the frontier has passed through a succession of de- creasingly pastoral stages. But in Cronon's reading of Turner things get reversed: "Turner's frontier, far from being an isolated rural society, was in fact the expanding edge of the boosters' urban empire." The coun- tryside did not languish in ecological innocence; it eagerly sought the city's markets and products, and was trans- formed accordingly. The products of the countryside were not sucked into Chicago against their will; that had been their destination all along. Be- yond the Board of Trade lay the former prairies, which had been measured into a grid and fenced, thereby turn- ing "the prairie into a commodity." Beyond the stockyards had been the buffalo herds, and the native short- grasses on which they had once grazed. Beyond the stacks of lumber along the South Branch of the Chicago River lay the great Cutover in the north country, where seemingly inexhaust- ible white-pine forests had been logged to exhaustion, leaving behind a new kind of wilderness-a desert of stumps and logging debris. But in Chicago these things were not visible. There the natural world had been reordered by the market, remade into second nature: "The cattle that gra ed on a Wyoming hillsIde, the corn that grew in an Iowa field, and the white pine that flourished in a Wisconsin forest would never ordinarily have shared the same landscape. All nonetheless came together in Chicago." What one saw in the city was commodities, not the ecological or moral consequences of producing them, and not seeing those consequences only made the commodities easier to buy. Consider the most notorious em- blem of Chicago in the late nineteenth century, the meat-packing plants. No visitor could help being impressed by their ghastly efficiency. The bravado of the packing business was caught perfectly by an American tourist, a natural booster, who, Cronon writes, stood before some scenic wonder in New Zealand and told his guide, "Well, I guess, stranger, you would reckon it a grander sight to see a man standing to his waist in blood sticking pigs. W e do that in my country." When Frederick Law Olmsted visited a hog-packing plant in Cincinnati, he and his party were so struck by the speed with which men butchered hogs that "we took out our watches and counted thirty-five seconds, from the moment when one hog touched the table until the next occupied its place." But other visitors found the packing plants fascinating for a different reason. "They were so excessively alive, these pigs," Rudyard Kipling wrote. "And then they were so excessively dead, and the man in the dripping, clammy, hot passage did not seem to care, and ere the blood of such an one had ceased to foam on the floor, such another, and four friends with him, had shrieked and died." Olmsted describes the machine, Kipling the victims of the machine. Cronon reminds us that in the world of first nature we are close enough kin to the hog to mourn his passing before we eat him. But in the city, at the end of what came to be called the "dis- assembly line," the whole hog was less valuable than his parts, everyone of which found a commercial use. The result was the utter abstraction of the hog (or steer) from nature, and the utter separation of meat from slaugh- ter. Cronon writes: In the packers' world, it was easy not to remember that eating was a moral act inex- tricably bound to killing. . . .The sheer vari- ety of these new standardized uses [for every part of the animal] testified to the packers' ingenuity in their war on waste, but in them the animal also died a second death. Severed from the form in which it had lived, severed from the act that had killed it, it vanished from human memory as one of nature's crea- tures. Its ties to the earth receded, and in forgetting the animal's life one also forgot the grasses and the prairie skies and the departed bison herds of a landscape that seemed more and more remote in space and time. The world of the marketplace, where city and country met, was-and re- mains-a world of such forgetting The farther a hog or a white-pine log or a bushel of grain was taken from nature, the more its value seemed to arise from the effort that human be- ings expended in bringing it to mar- 79 CHARLES WEBB designer / woodworker ,51 Mcêiråtb 1Hj Hw j'! ..' om tl M !;q :í-. ";p f; if. l1, Bðwbaêk,. ..' .AffiJ+Jliì f:' ,- : :. :. ", :. . . :. :-: r .: :-, .-', :: , .' 7 )$ u_ .:;: Catalog of Designs: Four Dollars SUN UP && SUN DOWN SUN UP! Delicious luncheons served alfresco on our marine terrace. SUN DOWN! Cocktails and gourmet dining. Day in, Day out Glencoe is The Real Bermuda Sailing-Kayaking-Windsurfing G Superb AccommodatIons .. .. t:' + -" encoe - _ 2 . HARBOURCWB , -:!o'<;> ... 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